Azerbaijan, Baku, November 2 / Trend N. Ismayilova /
According to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's forecasts, some commodity rich countries including Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, whose financial systems were smaller and less affected by the crisis, and whose growth is mostly driven by commodities, are also expected to grow faster in 2010, in the order of 5 percent or more, EBRD's new report on transition to market economy for 2009 said.
The economies of Central and Eastern Europe are expected to contract by an average of 6.3 percent in 2009 following steep output declines in the first half of the year. Signs of positive growth in the third quarter of 2009 suggest that the recession is now bottoming out in many countries of the EBRD region. However, any upturn in 2010 is likely to be fragile and patchy.
With the exceptions of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia, banking systems in the European transition region are generally majority foreign-owned, while in East Asia foreign ownership was very low, EBRD's report said.
"Azerbaijan's sector is heavily dominated by the government, with minimal market access," the report said.
Indicators of transition to the market economy, indicated in the report vary from 1 to 4 +, where "1" is an index of a slight change or invariability in the tough and centrally planned economy, and "4 +" - determines the level of standards for industrialized market economy.
The index of transition to a large-scale privatization is defined for Azerbaijan at the level of "2", small privatization - "4 ", liberalization of prices - "4", governance and restructuring of enterprises - "2", trade and currency exchange - "4", policy of competitiveness - "2", the level of banking reforms and liberalization of interest rates - "2 +", the securities market and non-bank loan organizations - "2 ", complete reform of infrastructure - "2."
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